5 Last-Minute Tech Gifts For People You Hate

The Internet is awash in gift guides. For every imaginable combination of adjectives and people (or pets, for that matter), there’s a 20-item list of holiday gift suggestions.

Those can be quite useful, of course, but what about the people in our lives for whom we are obligated to buy a gift, but may not be overly fond of? That too-chatty coworker. The obnoxious cousin you can’t stand. Your mildly racist uncle. They all need gifts too. Fortunately, there’s a wide range of less-than-desirable tech gifts, even if you’re wrapping up your shopping at the last conceivable minute:

1. Blackberry Storm 2

“Merry Christmas, I got you a smartphone!” Sounds exciting. Not if it’s a Blackberry Storm 2, though. When it came out in 2009, RIM’s touchscreen smartphone paled in comparison to Android or iPhone. Today, it looks downright ridiculous. While everybody else is unboxing Apple iPhone 5s and Google Nexus 4s, your not-so-loved one will be embarking on a new relationship with one of the least cool smartphones on the market.

2. QR Code Blanket

No offense to the person who worked hard to create this impressively complex tapestry, but QR codes are hideous no matter how skillfully you stitch them together. If you think normal 2D barcodes are cumbersome to scan, try ironing out every lump and wrinkle from a crocheted blanket and hovering over it with your smartphone.

3. Annoy-a-tron 2.0

This isn’t a gift you wrap and hand to somebody in the traditional fashion. Instead, you hide it. Really well. Then it makes irritating sounds and sends the recipient on a maddening hunt to try and find it. It’s tiny and at $11.99, you can afford to buy one for everyone you hate.

4. Windows Vista

Whether they use it or not, this gift sucks. If they install it, they’ll have nightmares. If they don’t, it’s just a useless box that will sit on their shelf and periodically remind them that you don’t particularly care for them.

5. Adobe Creative Suite 6 – On 5,077 Floppy Disks

I remember installing Photoshop 2.5 using a series of 3.5 inch floppy disks, inserting them into my PC’s noisy disk drive and waiting for each one to finish crunching through 1.44 megabytes of data. What a pain.

All these years later, Adobe is still making some of the most sophisticated design and production software on the planet. If you were to put the Adobe CS6 Master Collection onto floppy disks, you’d need 5,077 of them. That might be a cumbersome task for you, but it’s worth it when you consider what a useless and annoying gift this will make. You can even throw in a USB floppy disk drive to save them the trouble of tracking one down themselves. Oh, and since you probably don’t want to spend $2,400 on somebody you hate, you can always just download the trial version, which will make the whole thing even more obnoxious.